Meghan Markle Has Penned Another Powerful Essay About Being Biracial

“For castings, I was labeled ‘ethnically ambiguous.’ Was I Latina? Sephardic? ‘Exotic Caucasian’?”

Mar 21, 2017 9:19pm

By Mahalia Chang

After opening up about the struggles of being a biracial woman in Hollywood in a previous essay, Meghan Markle has again penned a letter about her relationship with identity and race.

Speaking to Allure for their ‘Beauty of Diversity’ issue, Meghan wrote about growing up and coming to grips with being half-white and half-black.

“I have the most vivid memories of being seven years old and my mom picking me up from my grandmother’s house,” she wrote. “There were the three of us, a family tree in an ombré of mocha next to the caramel complexion of my mom and light-skinned, freckled me. I remember the sense of belonging, having nothing to do with the colour of my skin.”

The actress, who is has been dating Prince Harry since late last year, noted that was taking an African-American Studies class at her alma mater Northwestern University (she graduated in 2003 with a double major in Theater and International Relations) that helped her to confront those thoughts of feeling “too light in the black community, too mixed in the white community”.

“For castings, I was labeled ‘ethnically ambiguous.’ Was I Latina? Sephardic? ‘Exotic Caucasian’? Add the freckles to the mix and it created quite the conundrum,” she wrote.

Continuing, she notes that, as a result, one of her biggest pet peeves is having her freckles airbrushed out of photo shoots.

“For all my freckle-faced friends out there, I will share with you something my dad told me when I was younger,” she ends the piece with, “‘A face without freckles is a night without stars.’ ”